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Company outlines tech pipeline

The world of digital agronomic tools is getting busier. Companies are working to bolster their offerings and link up their information-gathering tools with decision-making tech to help make your job easier. Last year Farmers Edge rolled out 19 new products, but in 2018 and through 2019, the company’s pipeline has expanded to 90 new products.

The new tools aim to leverage data analytics and machine learning to help farmers bolster profits on their operations. But why the big jump?

“I’ve gotten that comment before,” Jamie Denbow, global digital ag lead, Farmers Edge, tells Farm Progress. “I guess the more common question is, how do you guys move from a launch last year of 19 products and services, to 90 this year? The answer is that we had made the decision a year ago to make a significant investment in the infrastructure to build and put products out.”

That investment slowed the release of new tools, but the company is off and running now.

Denbow explains that the new tools coming to market have been going through multiple years of testing, and the aim was to build up the pipeline to improve service to the customer. That means providing tools that help the customer.

He points to the Harvest Manager tools that allows farmers to live-calibrate their yield monitors and develop not only a harvest map, but also a profit map from each field. “This is information farmers can use for making upcoming purchase decisions for their farm,” he says.

On the agronomic side, the company continues expanding its growth-state models to include 14 crops. It’s also launching disease and insect prediction models to help farmers decide which fields need treating, and when. “We’re helping a farmer decide what fields will need to be treated, what might need variable-rate treatments and what fields don’t need to be treated at all,” he says.

The company has been offering the option of multiple satellite images by the week to help manage crops. “The satellite images can focus on crop health, but we also provide the RGB image, too — so it’s easier for the scout to go right to the problem area in the field," Denbow says.

The company even announced it is working with Raven and its Slingshot system to capture information into the Farmers Edge platform for crop management. The company is moving ahead at a rapid clip. What follows is a rundown of the new tools and innovation areas from Farmers Edge.

Updates and moreWhat follows is a rundown of the new tools and innovation areas from Farmers Edge. All the innovations announced are built on the FarmCommand platform. Here’s a list of new tools announced recently:

• FarmCommand Mobile App. This provides farmer access to key information in the cab or in the field. This is an integrated farm management application with field-centric weather, map layers, recordkeeping, scouting tools and instant job data.

• Crop Health Change Alerts. This is a service that is under development. It provides change notifications in field health to growers by processing imagery in 48 hours into three unique maps. Growers get a notification if there’s a change in field status.

• Gen 2 CanPlug. This is new hardware for capturing machinery data. The new CanPlug can capture live harvest and provide profit-data tracking.

• Rapid Data Processing Engine. This is part of that infrastructure improvement with a system that provides insights faster, and is capable of daily and on-demand processing of field-centric imagery, equipment, application and harvest data.

• Harvest Manager. Launching this fall, this system provides live grain tracking including storage management, contract creation, field pass cost accumulation and live revenue calculation.

• Profits on the Go. The FarmCommand App will soon factor in variable costs to measure real-time profit analysis during harvest. The system will incorporate commodity prices, input and product costs, labor and other input costs with live-yield data.

• Treatment Analysis. This system offers a return-on-investment analysis for treatment areas, allowing growers to compare treatments across a single field.

• Insurance Products. Farmers Edge announced earlier this year it was working with PartnerRe to develop insurance products in main crop growing areas. These are data-driven insurance products.

• EScout. The company has integrated daily satellite imagery into eScout, an app designed to help ag professionals enhance their agronomic services to customers. EScout, a new field-monitoring tool, features GPS, a database of pests and an agronomic calculator.

• Inventory Management. This can help growers plan for the season, prepare for field operations and control stock requirements.

• Advanced Equipment Reporting. Analyzing the performance of every machine in your operation can help you boost efficiency. This system provides comparative equipment information on both individual and aggregated levels.

• Advanced Variety Benchmarking. With full-farm reporting on inputs, farmers can get insights on hybrids and varieties to determine which respond best on their farm. The system allows analysis of other factors, like inputs and seed selection.

• Pest Prediction. Pest models are being released this year to notify growers of specific disease and insect risks in their fields, including fusarium head blight, wheat midge, sclerotinia, soybean aphid, corn gray leaf spot and northern leaf blight.